State of Contentment

Iowa leaders say their schools are among the nation's best. But
does everyone agree that's good enough?

Council Bluffs, Iowa

Entering Hoover Elementary School in Council Bluffs, Iowa, is like
stepping back in time: back to before the Vietnam War, the Kennedy
assassination--back 30 or 40 years. The school is spick-and-span, on a
street lined with maple trees and pleasant houses with lamps in picture
windows. The children, virtually all of them white, wear clean,
tucked-in shirts, say thank you and no thank you, and don't talk during
class.

Teachers tend to stand in front of the room giving instructions in
short, swift declarative sentences. They never have to yell; their
plain Midwestern voices have natural carry. The students sit at their
neat desks transcribing the teachers' parsed words, and they do what
they're told with little fuss. When a teacher glares at a girl chewing
gum, the girl simply tucks it into a piece of paper, which she drops
into a wastebasket, and resumes taking notes.

Iowa manages to outperform most other states on a number of important
educational measures. On the highly regarded National Assessment of
Educational Progress, for example, Iowa consistently ranks among the
top half-dozen states. And an impressive 93 percent of its students
earn high school diplomas. Is Iowa doing something other states should
be doing? Has it implemented effective education reforms? Or does
Iowa's success stem from the fact that it is rural and homogeneous,
relatively free of big-city problems that bring other states down?

Here at Hoover Elementary, Principal Daniel Fellows, who it turns
out is only weeks from retirement, says he will not--cannot--speak for
what is going on in other Iowa districts and schools. The refrain was
the same at several other schools and classrooms across the state
during visits last spring.

Iowa's cornfields may roll on forever and ever, but its school
districts are boldly demarcated. Local school control is sacred in
Iowa, and principals are quick to explain that the district just up the
road will have its own curriculum, its own standards, its own way of
doing business.

Iowa is one of only three states--Montana and Wyoming are the other
two--not writing statewide academic standards. Nor are statewide
assessments in the works. Most Iowa educators say this is not a
problem. Many chortle over the fact that Education Week, in its
1997 report card on the condition of education in the 50 states, gave
Iowa an F for failing to implement state standards and assessments.
"They gave us an F in a course we never even signed up for," Ted
Stilwill, the director of the state education department, said on Iowa
television.

Fellows says there have been few major changes at Hoover over the
past 10 years. "We've renovated the building, added a computer center,
but that's about it. We were a good school then, and we're a good
school now. We haven't really had to add anything, to bring in anything
new."

Fellows obviously is proud of the refurbished building. "Our
taxpayers are good school supporters," he says.

In one 4th grade classroom, the teacher is a measured, somewhat
imposing woman who has pinned to her dress a brooch that spells out
t-e-a-c-h-e-r. When she says "shhhh," the students in turn "shhh" one
another; order reigns supreme.

The teacher divides the students into small work groups, telling
each one that it has $50 to plan a party. The groups must work within
this budget to order food, decorations, and anything else they may
like. "But how will we know how much these things cost?" one student
asks. The teacher, as if by sleight of hand, produces a raft of grocery
store inserts and Toys R Us catalogs, which she distributes. As the
students page through the advertisements, the teacher says, "Here's
what I'll be grading you on: the paragraph explaining the theme of your
party and the math you use to calculate your budget."

"We're pretty traditional, and that's the way the community
wants it. No one is yelling for change."

Sandra Thorpe,
vice principal,
Lincoln High School

A banner stretches across the front of the classroom: "Fourth grade,
it's the real thing." On one wall is the Circus Poetry Corner, where
such student-composed alliterations as "leaping lions" and "terrific
tightrope walker," are posted. The opposite wall is covered with dozens
of gold-starred worksheets. The first line of one reads: "Rules for a
community are called: a) laws b) acts c) decisions."

As the class approaches its final minutes, the students clean up
with remarkable efficiency; when the next class arrives, scissors,
paper, and circulars are all out of sight.

In a 4th grade science classroom, construction-paper human bodies
dangle from the ceiling; orange and red wedges delineate the organs.
"What do you know about muscles?" the teacher asks the class.

"They help you lift things," one student says.

"Is there a muscle you can't stop?" the teacher asks.

"Closing your eyes when you sleep," a student says. The teacher
shakes her head.

A single computer sits in a corner of the classroom. A sign posted
on the terminal reads, "Do not use without adult supervision."

Of a dozen randomly chosen schools here, roughly half are like
Hoover. There are small variations here and there, but for the most
part, the teachers talk, the students appear to listen, and the
principal--expressing confidence in his or her staff--stays out of the
way. There is little evidence at these schools of the education reform
movement that has swept much of the country. A few teachers use forms
of cooperative learning. A large school has been divided into "houses."
There is a new emphasis on technology. (A number of schools have new
computer labs, but few have many machines in the classrooms.) And
that's about it.

The administrators and teachers working at these schools are under
no illusion that they are on the "cutting edge." In fact, they say
their wariness of reform is a strength, not a weakness. "I think it's
of primary importance that we haven't gone to frills, bells, and
whistles," says Duane Frick, the principal of Jefferson Junior High
School in Dubuque. "We're cautious, and we won't jump on the bandwagon
just because something new is coming along."

The idea that reforms are "frills, bells, and whistles" is common in
Iowa. "We're never the first to jump on anything new," says Darrell
Brand, the principal of the high school in rural Montezuma. Grinning,
he adds: "Maybe we're slower than slow--we're molasses."

Bill Cox, the superintendent of the small district--its elementary
school, junior high, and high school are in different wings of the same
building--says: "We don't have frills. We may not have a lot of
electives. But if our kids are successful here, they can make it any
place at any level. Eighty-five percent of our students enroll at
college or community college after graduating from here."

If Hoover is a typical Iowa elementary school, then Lincoln High
School in working-class south Des Moines is a typical tradition-bound
secondary school. "We're about the same now as we were 10 years ago,"
says Vice Principal Sandra Thorpe. And she ought to know. Thorpe
graduated from Lincoln High in 1962. In fact, all five administrators
are Lincoln alumni.

Thorpe believes that if anything has changed over the years it's the
students, not the school. "The big difference between today and years
ago is that we would never have gotten away with what kids get away
with now," she says. "The standards for behavior are not nearly as high
as they once were, and the expectations in some classes are not as high
either."

Later, she adds, "We're pretty traditional, and that's the way the
community wants it. No one is yelling for change."

As for Iowa's decision not to jump on the standards-setting
bandwagon, Thorpe says, "We've been criticized as a state that lets
districts go their own way and do their own thing. I don't think
there's anything wrong with that, and maybe more states should do
that."

Iowa educators are hardly surprised that their schools are among
the best on measures of student achievement.

On a short tour of the large, labyrinthine school, the bell rings and
the corridors flood with students. A couple of minutes later, they're
gone. "It always amazes me," Thorpe muses, "that 2,000 students can
move so smoothly from one class to the other in five minutes."

In a Spanish class, students are conjugating irregular verbs. In
algebra, students are solving for "x," and in a psychology class,
students are watching a video of a trembling man talking about how
someone is putting thoughts into his head, giving him a headache.

The psychology teacher is young and enthusiastic. He tries, with an
entertainer's flourish, to interest his 30 students: He lowers his
master-of-ceremonies voice for dramatic effect, prances back and forth
upon an imaginary stage, and asks some good, probing questions. But
he's working a tough crowd. The students, all sitting in long, tidy
rows, are by equal measure fidgeting, primping, or glazed-over.

"Is this guy in the video normal?" the teacher asks.

A girl sitting in the back row, who ends up making almost half the
student responses, says, "There's a strong social-expectation component
to being normal. Unconventional behavior is considered not normal."

The teacher follows up by asking, "Can you give me an example of
behavior that's not normal?"

A wise guy says, "Picking your nose," which receives a few hisses.
But there are a few forthright responses, too. One student says, "It's
when people act out for no reason, having no obvious motivation."
Another adds, "It's like what happens in Tourette's syndrome, when
people swear and yell out for no reason."

The teacher tries to turn this into a discussion about
normalization, about how difficult it is to draw lines between genuine
emotional illness, eccentricity, and nonconformist behavior, but he is
clearly swimming upstream. Trying to incite interest, the teacher talks
about demons and witches, about how holes were once drilled in heads to
relieve headaches and nightmares, about how rebels and freethinkers
have been ostracized and labeled "ill" in different societies. But it's
of little use. At one point, he asks a girl who has been watching the
clock and twirling strands of hair around her index finger what she
thinks about all of this. "I don't know," she says with undisguised
boredom. "That's cool. That's cool," the teacher responds.

In one biology class, the teacher is a man with such a gung-ho
Marine Corps approach that it's almost refreshing. He's tough but also
cracks unexpected jokes and breaks into big cartoon-character grins.
The students clearly like him. As they read from the text, he eggs them
on, exclaiming, "Concentrate now, guys, concentrate!" When he assigns
homework, he says,"Drill and practice, drill and practice! Remember, I
can quiz you at any time."

Today's lesson encompasses a review of the skeletal and excretory
systems, followed by a brief introduction to the endocrine system,
better known, he explains, as the glands. "I think you'll enjoy this
unit on the endocrine system," he tells the students. And it's just
possible they may. The teacher relates a few anecdotes about huge
people with malfunctioning pituitary glands and diabetics on the edge
of insulin shock. "Stay tuned," he says when the bell rings. "We'll be
getting a cow's heart and kidneys in the next few days."

Iowa educators are hardly surprised that their schools are among the
best in the nation on measures of student achievement. They know their
state has a number of natural advantages, which they are happy to
enumerate. Most begin by citing Iowa's strong work ethic, reflected in
the state's astounding ability to feed much of the world. "The values
of the agricultural culture dominate the state, even if there are far
fewer farmers than there once were," one teacher tells me. "Hard work,
dependability, a reliance upon family--Iowa was about all those things
long before the politicians used them for sloganeering."

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